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Sharing non-observational knowledge
Get PDFOne can know without observation what one is up to, but can one know without observation what someone else is up to? I explore two strategies for defending the claim that one can. The first strategy relies on the fact that one can know what someone is doing by accepting what they tell one about what they are doing. It proposes that testimony can preserve the credentials of a piece of knowledge so that if a benefactor has non-observational knowledge, then a recipient of their testimony can acquire non-observational knowledge by accepting it. The second strategy appeals to the existence of collective activities. It proposes that where a number of people engage in a collective activity, each can know what each is up to, and that knowledge can be had without observation. My goal is to set out both strategies. A secondary aim is to suggest grounds for greater optimism about the prospects of the first strategy than the second
Cohesive Institutions and political violence
Get PDFCan revenue sharing of resource rents be a source of distributive conflict? Can co- hesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local gov- ernment revenues and new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to study these questions. We find a strong link between rents and conflict. Conflicts are highly organized and concentrated in districts and time-periods with unelected local govern- ments. Once local governments are elected these relationships are much weaker. We argue that elections produce more cohesive institutions that help limit distributional conflict between groups. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data
Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously : eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity
Get PDFSelf-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control
Computation of the Taut, the Veering and the Teichmüller polynomials
Get PDFLandry, Minsky and Taylor (LMT) introduced two polynomial invariants of veering triangulations—the taut polynomial and the veering polynomial. Here, we consider a pair of taut polynomials associated to one veering triangulation, the upper and the lower one, and analogously the upper and lower veering polynomials. We prove that the upper and lower taut polynomials are equal. In contrast, the upper and lower veering polynomials of the same veering triangulation may differ by more than a unit. We give algorithms to compute all these invariants. LMT related the Teichmüller polynomial of a fibered face of the Thurston norm ball with the taut polynomial of the associated layered veering triangulation. We use this result to give an algorithm to compute the Teichmüller polynomial of any fibered face of the Thurston norm ball
From extreme weather events to ‘cascading vulnerabilities’ : participatory flood research methodologies in Brazil during COVID-19
Get PDFExtreme weather events are entangled with each other and with other extreme events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-racist protests, drought, a housing crisis, strikes, or climate emergencies, as well as with more general inadequacies due to national, economic, and political upheavals and accreted vulnerabilities from long-term policies or inactions. Effects of extreme weather events are intensified by ongoing social injustices like poverty and structural racism, a housing deficit, and the consequent informal and unplanned occupation of hazardous areas, such as riverbanks, and areas of previous social-environmental disasters. In the context of Brazil, the ongoing deforestation in the Amazon (agribusiness, mining and illegal wood) provoking droughts and energy shortages in the region creates further vulnerabilities that are felt globally. In this paper, our primary contribution to these inter-connected scenarios is to describe methodological interventions that were made in response to COVID-19, and to show how those changes provided new insights into vulnerability processes of both subjects and researchers. During a larger project (Waterproofing Data), focused on the case study research areas of São Paulo and Acre (Brazil) wherein our wider team conducted flood-risk community research, we were forced to rethink our approach. We moved away from the singularity of the flood event and its impacts toward acknowledging the cascading conditions of social vulnerability (caused by weather, health, social and political conditions). In this paper, we directly address the ‘cascade of vulnerabilities’ that the flood-prone communities already encounter when researchers seek to engage with them. We open new avenues to reconsider citizenship, space, and innovation in terms of the key challenges that our methods encountered when conducting participatory flood research methodologies, particularly during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 to November 2021. Through flood research in Brazil, we articulate methodological contributions from the arts, humanities, and social sciences for more realistic, just, and caring research practices within and about weather in the context of ‘slow violence’ [Nixon, R (2013). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP]
Accounting theory, ethnography, and the silence of the social
Get PDFPurpose: This paper offers a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography in particular. Design/methodology/approach: I build on Stefan Hirschauer’s methodological reflections on ethnography and the “silence of the social” to briefly re-articulate some of the ideas I had associated, in an earlier piece, with the investigation of tacit coordination in accounting. Findings: Ethnography is an intrinsically theoretical practice and also a particular form of accounting. As such, it presents a paradigm case for how accounting theory builds on, and emerges from, social research in joint efforts of breaking the silence of the social. Ethnographic research, like the practice of accounting and social research more generally, is associated with a stewardship of silence and an “ethics of mattering” (Karen Barad), and accounting theory is an invitation to reflect on the underlying practices of (dis-)articulation. Originality/value: The paper invites readers to engage with accounting practice as a topic of systematic theoretical interest to explore how we put the world on the record, understand the choices we make in the process, and the silences we let lie
The autocorrelated Bayesian sampler : a rational process for probability judgments, estimates, confidence intervals, choices, confidence judgments, and response times
Get PDFNormative models of decision-making that optimally transform noisy (sensory) information into categorical decisions qualitatively mismatch human behavior. Indeed, leading computational models have only achieved high empirical corroboration by adding task-specific assumptions that deviate from normative principles. In response, we offer a Bayesian approach that implicitly produces a posterior distribution of possible answers (hypotheses) in response to sensory information. But we assume that the brain has no direct access to this posterior, but can only sample hypotheses according to their posterior probabilities. Accordingly, we argue that the primary problem of normative concern in decision-making is integrating stochastic hypotheses, rather than stochastic sensory information, to make categorical decisions. This implies that human response variability arises mainly from posterior sampling rather than sensory noise. Because human hypothesis generation is serially correlated, hypothesis samples will be autocorrelated. Guided by this new problem formulation, we develop a new process, the Autocorrelated Bayesian Sampler (ABS), which grounds autocorrelated hypothesis generation in a sophisticated sampling algorithm. The ABS provides a single mechanism that qualitatively explains many empirical effects of probability judgments, estimates, confidence intervals, choice, confidence judgments, response times, and their relationships. Our analysis demonstrates the unifying power of a perspective shift in the exploration of normative models. It also exemplifies the proposal that the “Bayesian brain” operates using samples not probabilities, and that variability in human behavior may primarily reflect computational rather than sensory noise
Lying for viewers : commingled partisan falsehoods increase viewing and sharing of news media
No full textIs there an economic incentive for celebrities and well-known media firms to commingle falsehoods into news stories? We conducted five experiments, plus a field validation using secondary data. When presented by celebrities and well-known media firms, a commingled partisan falsehood in an otherwise true news story significantly increased viewing and sharing intentions among politically aligned viewers. The effect was weaker but significant when we replaced the celebrity with an unknown speaker and disappeared when both the celebrity and the well-known firm were replaced by unknowns. This effect was explained by confirmation bias and the viewer’s belief that the falsehood was true. In contrast, a false news story focusing on the same falsehood increased viewing and sharing intentions only when presented by unknowns, with viewers’ belief playing a limited role. The field study found a significantly positive relationship between a commingled partisan falsehood in videos of well-known media firms and actual viewership. We conclude that commingled partisan falsehoods provide a significant viewership increase for celebrities and well-known media firms, creating an economic incentive for lying and posing complex challenges in the fake news era. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in this area for policymakers and media firms
The null result penalty
No full textWe examine how the evaluation of research studies in economics depends on whether a study yielded a null result. Studies with null results are perceived to be less publishable, of lower quality, less important, and less precisely estimated than studies with large and statistically significant results, even when holding constant all other study features, including the sample size and the precision of the estimates. The null result penalty is of similar magnitude among PhD students and journal editors. The penalty is larger when experts predict a large effect and when statistical uncertainty is communicated with p-values rather than standard errors. Our findings highlight the value of pre-results review